In Pacific Rim, Armageddon rises to art

Hollywood loves to imagine the end. Not of movies, which will always be around--remember the Beta tape of Hello, Dolly! that so entranced WALLE in the arid rubble of future earth?--but of civilization as we know it. If our world isn't already postmortem, as in Tom Cruise's Oblivion and Will Smith's After Earth, then zombies are overrunning the planet (World War Z) or we are in search of a Superman to stop an alien attack (Man of Steel). Washington must be especially vulnerable to terrorist attacks: Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down both imagined an imperiled POTUS, with the latter...